Recommended

2009-04-18

How to set up an external monitor for watching movies with the nvidia proprietary x.org driver

This post describes how to set up your /etc/X11/xorg.conf on Linux if you have a laptop with an NVIDIA video card, and you want to attach an external monitor for watching movies with MPlayer. Please note that the external monitor is not for regular work, so normally you don't want to put windows there, or use the mouse or keyboard to interact with windows on the external monitor.

How to configure the X server

If you enable TwinView in /etc/X11/xorg.conf (possibly using the command nvidia-xconfig, you'll get one big X11 screen (DISPLAY=:0), with windows possibly spanning two two displays. This is not what you want now. What you want is to have two, independent X11 screens, the laptop's built-in LCD display (DISPLAY=:0.0) running your regular X11 session, and the external monitor (DISPLAY=:0.1) showing the movies played. (Sending audio to the external monitor's speakers is not described here.)

To configure the X.Org X11 server for this, you have to modify /etc/X11/xorg.conf the following way. You have to add a new "Monitor" section, a new "Device" section and a new "Screen" section. First make a backup of your config file: sudo cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf{,.single.good}. Then modify the config file like this:

# ADD or modify this ServerLayout sectionSection "ServerLayout" Identifier ... # Multiple InputDevice entries are OK InputDevice ... ... # SET ... to the name of your original Section "Screen". Screen 0 "..." 0 0 # MAKE sure that the number you specify is larger than # the maximum width of your screens. Otherwise the mouse # pointer may accidentally wrap one the edge of one screen # to another. Screen 1 "screen1" 1300 0EndSection

Make sure that the position you specify for Screen 1 in ServerLayout is large enough, i.e. it is larger than the maximum width of your screens. http://users.tkk.fi/spniskan/switchscreen/ gives the same instructions: Define in the ServerLayout section the second screen's position to be farther away than the first screen's width.. Doing this makes sure that the mouse pointer won't accidentaly wrap from one screen to another when you move it out at the edge of any of the screens.

After modifying /etc/X11/xorg.conf, make a backup copy of the new version (sudo cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf{,.twoscreens.try}), close all applications, connect the external monitor, then restart your X11 session by pressing Ctrl-Alt-<BackSpace>. If it doesn't start up again, or you get some display configuration dialog, then there was something wrong with your modifications to /etc/X11/xorg.conf, and you have to fix it. To do so, press Ctrl-Alt-<F1> to switch to text mode, log in, then stop GDM by running sudo /etc/init.d/gdm stop, then have a look at the startup log file /var/log/Xorg.0.log , and edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf accordingly (you may have to copy it back from /etc/X11/xorg.conf.twoscreens.try first). To try your changes, run X (or sudo X), which displays a black-and-white dotted background on both screens, and an X-shaped mouse cursor on screen 0 (the laptop LCD). Exit by pressing Ctrl-Alt-<BackSpace>. If that one works, you may want to try startx to get a more interesting X session. Exit again by pressing Ctrl-Alt-<BackSpace>. Make a backup copy of the config file (sudo cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf{,.twoscreens.good}, and restart GDM: sudo /etc/X11/gdm restart.

How to prevent the GNOME panel and the icons from appearing on the second screen

Sorry, I don't know the right answer. The panels are drawn by gnome-panel. You can remove all but one, and GNOME will remember it upon relogin. If you remove all panels from a screen, GNOME will recreate the panels with the default configuration :-(. The desktop icons are drawn by nautilus. I have no idea how to disable it on the second screen. The window manager is metacity or compiz (use ps x to find out which is running). You can disable compiz on the second screen by appending the line COMPIZ_OPTIONS="$COMPIZ_OPTIONS --only-current-screen" to ~/.config/compiz/compiz-manager .

How to change the background image

Install ImageMagick with sudo apt-get install imagemagick. Then run display -window root -display :0.1 background.jpg. Please note that this will tile (repeat) copies of the image. You may want to resize the image to fit the screen size: display -window root -display :0.1 -resize 1920x1080 background.jpg, but this may ruin the aspect ratio. Use your favorite image editor (such as GIMP) to create an image of the right size. If you use GNOME, this trick might be useful: http://gnome-hacks.org/hacks.html?id=6 (but it sets the background for multiple screens).

How to move the mouse and switch the keyboard focus to the other X11 screen

If you use GNOME, run switchscreen by pressing Ctrl-<F2>, and typing switchscreen plus Enter. You can use your desktop environment's configuration or xbindkeys to bind a key combination to switchscreen.

How to play a movie with mplayer on the external monitor

Run mplayer -display :0.1 -osdlevel 3 -fs movie.avi . If you don't see the the number of seconds elapsed, you may have to configure the MPlayer OSD font. If the OSD text is two large, append lines subfont-text-scale = 3 and subfont-osd-scale = 3 to the file ~/.mplayer/config . If the aspect ratio is wrong on the external monitor, but it is good on the LCD display, specify the flag -monitorpixelaspect X in the mplayer command line above, experimenting with values between 0.5 and 2.0 for X.